1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to multilingual and multicultural support in data processing systems and in particular to separately defining language and regional cultural conventions for user interface displays within data processing systems. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to providing separate language and locale properties individually defining language and regional cultural conventions for user interface displays in a data processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most contemporary operating systems include a xe2x80x9cLocalexe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cregional settingxe2x80x9d attribute or property, which is typically is defined as specifying an identifiable political, geographical, or cultural region employing a distinct language and certain conventions such as date formats, currency types and formats, number or time formats, sorting orders, and the like. This attribute acts as a combined setting for both the language employed in a data processing system""s user interface and the regional conventions identified above which are employed for that data processing system.
The combined language/locale property for a data processing system is conventionally integrated and selected as part of the language selection, so that users are provided with options for the locale properties or xe2x80x9cregional settingxe2x80x9d such as xe2x80x9cEnglish (United States),xe2x80x9d xe2x80x9cEnglish (South Africa),xe2x80x9d xe2x80x9cFrench (Belgian),xe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cFrench (Canadian),xe2x80x9d etc. All cultural support, including display formatting and sorting orders, for applications within the data processing system are then derived from this single property.
Data processing systems configured with a combined language/locale property from which all language and cultural support features are set lack flexibility in defining the manner in which dates and currencies are displayed and in which numbers and text strings are sorted. Such environments also inhibit multilingual support by creating significant barriers to dynamic language and/or locale shifting.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide a mechanism for providing separate definition of language and locale properties within a data processing system.
It is therefore one object of the present invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for multilingual and multicultural support in data processing systems.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for separately defining language and regional cultural conventions for user interface displays within data processing systems.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for providing separate language and locale properties individually defining language and regional cultural conventions for user interface displays in a data processing system.
The foregoing objects are achieved as is now described. Separate language and locale properties are implemented within a data processing system. The language property only controls selection of the human language employed for user interface text and, preferably, the sort order for textbased items displayed in the user interface. The locale property controls all other cultural support, including holidays and religious observances, number format, date format, currency and currency format, time format, etc. This split allows a particular language to be selected without utilizing a particular set of cultural conventions associated with a region in which the selected language is dominant. Instead, the cultural conventions may be selected for an entirely different region. The bifurcation of language and locale properties also facilitates dynamic switching of user interface views, allowing layering of user interface text from underlying operational components and simplifying the requirements associated with changing from user interface text in one human language to the same user interface text in a different human language.
The above as well as additional objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will become apparent in the following detailed written description.